The color of shock waves in photonic crystals

Unexpected and novel new physical phenomena result when light interacts with a shock wave or shock-like dielectric modulation propagating through a photonic crystal. These theoretically predicted new phenomena include the capture of light at the shock wave front and re-emission at a tunable pulse rate and carrier frequency across the photonic crystal bandgap, and bandwidth narrowing as opposed to the ubiquitous bandwidth broadening. To our knowledge, these effects do not occur in any other physical system. Reversed Doppler shifts are also predicted to be observable. The generality of these effects make them amenable to observation in a variety of time-dependent photonic crystal systems, which may have interesting technological implications.